PRESENTATION: Eva Koťátková-My Body Is Not An Island
In her work, Eva Koťátková combines objects, collages, costumes, and texts into vast, playful, poetic, and often performative installations, to suggest how deeply our personal lives are swayed by our social environment with its codes and norms. This is materialized by complex machineries that constrain the body, but also hold possibilities for its transformation. Taking its cue from theatrical devices, a critique of psychiatric ethos, and certain forms of experimental education, Koťátková’s work develops in tight connection with narratives – a narration in fragments, scattered across the exhibition, that make up the image of the world.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Urbane Künste Ruhr Archive
In her installation “My Body Is Not An Island”, Czech artist Eva Koťátková brings the idea of a collective body to life. Including all the political implications that go with it, first and foremost the questions are: How do we take care of each other? Who speaks and is heard and who remains invisible or is silenced? “My Body Is Not an Island” takes the shape of a gigantic body, part-fish, part-human; each part tells a myriad of stories whose entrancing litany echoes throughout the exhibition space. With its inscrutable, troubling identity, and the way it unfolds like an immersive landscape, it is accessible to any visitor willing to lend an ear to its many stories. Performers share with the public the different stories it contains: that of a child bullied at school, of a shrimp being boiled alive, or of a bush torn away from its native surroundings to be replanted in the suburbs. As a whole, the spirit of the installation seems to rest upon the cry for a life with more empathy and less normative pressure uttered by one of its protagonists: “I dream of a body endowed with many skins.” The fragmented body holds within its belly an assortment of boxes and crates from which beast-like and human-like creatures seem poised to escape. Bodies in flight, transient and transitory; bodies that refuse to be named; bodies that cannot be ascribed any label; bodies that won’t keep quiet; bodies that express freely what they feel and what they dream of. The recurring motif of the crate is a symbol both of mobility and movability – whether voluntary or forced – from one place or state to another, and of normativity and codification, typifying our urging desire to put everything into neat boxes, to contain, as it were, our fear of ambiguity, rather than to think outside the box. The installation proposes a platform opened with empathy to those whose voices (human, vegetal, animal ) are reduced to silence, whose condition is challenged, whose life has been uprooted, and who undergo forced labelling and stigmatisation. Many stories, told from human and non-human perspectives, deal with traumatic experiences of physical and psychological oppression and are based on a collection of stories assembled over decades by the artist. This collection is expanded by drawings, collages and texts by the visitors. In dialogue with the spectacular post-war architecture of the former Catholic Liebfrauen parish church in downtown Duisburg, which was deconsecrated in 2010, a poetic, at times dreamlike site is created that nonetheless stimulates an examination of social realities, calls for empathy and critical imagination, and encourages us to resist the prevailing normative pressure on our bodies. The Ruhr Area is the third stop of the exhibition, which was on view at CAPC Bordeaux in 2022 and at the National Gallery in Prague until June of this year. The journey through the different institutional spaces has changed the fish-human being, the collective body has grown by thousands of new stories, but also reveals an increasing fragmentation: In Duisburg, the tail fin of the fish is imagined to be in the inland harbor, which is within walking distance. By moving between the two locations of the exhibition, the visitors collectively create the missing body of the fish. The metaphor of the fish out of water thus acquires a direct connection to public space and, as a situation between life and death, a great urgency.
Photo: Eva Kotatkova, My Body Is Not An Island, Duisburg 2023, © Eva Kotatkova, Courtesy Katja Illner Urbane Künste Ruhr
Info: Curator: Britta Peters, Assistant Curator: Alisha Raissa Danscher, Urbane Künste Ruhr, Kulturkirche Liebfrauen Duisburg, König-Heinrich-Platz 3, Duisburg, Germany, Duration: 12/8-23/9/2023, Days & Hours: Wed-sun 12:00-19:00, performances: Thu 17:00-19:00, Sat 14:00-17:00, www.urbanekuensteruhr.de/
